The Southern Journal The Official News Outlet of the South Pacific

Defenders in the Age of Frontiers and Strongholds By Qvait   In the past five months, we have seen discussion aplenty concerning the future of NationStates, with Sedgistan unveiling a proposal to implement a system currently referred to as frontiers and strongholds, earlier referred to as democracy and autocracy. Since then, the growing consensus has been when, not if, frontiers and strongholds will become a feature of NationStates, leading regional governments scrambling to figure out how to respond. As seen in elections abroad, some prospective regional leaders in game-created regions have struggled to respond to the frontiers and strongholds question. In October, while seeking the delegacy in The East Pacific, then-candidate Albrook said, “I wish to learn from our allied GCRs what their plans are.” Even in the South Pacific, Roavin stated as a candidate for Minister of Foreign Affairs in October, “I...will be talking to [other] regions about those changes to see how they stand on it and where our interests align.” However, others have stated that their region will have to adapt to a new reality imposed by frontiers and strongholds. Campaigning for the delegacy in The North Pacific, MadJack said as a candidate in September, “It will mean we have to be more outgoing, more co-operative in how we conduct ourselves in Nationstates gameplay in order to compete.” In Nakari’s campaign to become the Delegate of The Rejected Realms, she said in November, “I think we are better off planning for it and trying to see the good in it than hoping for it not to happen and being left unprepared.” It is worth noting that there is still time for the South Pacific and like-minded defenders to craft a strategy concerning frontiers and strongholds because the feature is not yet a fixture of NationStates. However, time may very well be running out, and I will argue that defenders should collectively establish the rules and norms that will come t0 define frontiers and strongholds before others do it for us. The first area that defenders should examine in response to frontiers and strongholds is internal security within their respective regions. As a game-created region, the South Pacific will face an unprecedented threat to its security as it will receive half as many nations as it does today. Our delegate, whomever they will be when NationStates implements the new interregional system, will begin to see a reduction in endorsements, as will our members in the Council on Regional Security and South Pacific Coral Guard. Thankfully, the South Pacific moved to a flexible endorsement cap in 2020 because the Council on Regional Security would have needed to discuss lowering the cap if the region retained a fixed cap. Accordingly, the threat of an invasion or a coup carries less risk to the South Pacific. However, we will have to constantly monitor the endorsement gap between the delegate and everyone else. We will revisit the issue of endorsements when discussing the World Assembly. Second, we must acknowledge that the central purpose of frontiers and strongholds is an attempt to rebalance raiding and defending toward the former. In the contemporary era of NationStates, defenders have managed to establish dominance in military gameplay, making even the most vicious forms of raiding, such as griefing, almost entirely devoid of existence in NationStates. The proposed system of frontiers and strongholds will represent a new, unique threat to the sovereignty of many regions in NationStates. To prevent the raiders from gaining the upper hand in the next era, defenders must expand their militaries and increase the participation rate in bidaily military operations to stymie any opportunity for the raiders to invade regions and ultimately destroy them. Due to frontiers and strongholds, the need to generate public interest in joining defender militaries will increase. However, therein lies another issue that defenders must resolve: having enough people joining their regions and, ultimately, the cause. As stated earlier, the South Pacific stands to lose half of its potential citizens because of frontiers and strongholds, negatively impacting citizen participation within the region. Other feeders will have to confront the same issue, but we will focus on how frontiers and strongholds will impact the South Pacific as the sole defender feeder. The Assembly will inevitably have fewer legislators, and the South Pacific Special Forces may likewise witness a reduction in number, preventing the region from cultivating a sizeable next generation of defenders. Defenders in user-created regions face another troubling question: whether to risk becoming a frontier to enjoy the benefit of having new nations spawn within their respective regions. One idea proposes the establishment of satellite frontiers that both allow the main region to exist as a stronghold, thereby retaining a strong founder that can prevent raids against their regions while also enjoying bringing new nations into the main region through the satellite frontier. However, the next question becomes defending these artificial frontiers from being stolen by raiders. The South Pacific could follow suit and create an artificial frontier to recoup, at least in part, any losses caused by the new interregional system, but the presence of other frontiers will nonetheless make it impossible for the South Pacific to enjoy the share of nations that currently spawn within the region. More discussion is necessary to determine how the South Pacific will confront the impending issue of declining citizen participation. Returning to endorsements, defenders with interests in the World Assembly Security Council will also feel the effects of frontiers and strongholds. We may witness a massive redistribution of World Assembly endorsements away from game-created regions, particularly among feeders, and in the direction toward user-created regions. Security Council-minded defenders should take heed of this change. At the time of writing, the Partnership for Sovereignty consists of two game-created regions and seven user-created regions, a balance that may ultimately represent a positive outcome for the interregional bloc if the redistribution of World Assembly endorsements occurs as hypothesized, with the bloc standing to gain more combined endorsements, but the share of frontiers that will exist and halving of the South Pacific’s potential citizens could offset such gains or produce a net loss in endorsements, thereby reducing the Partnership for Sovereignty’s influence in the Security Council. To reduce the loss in endorsements, the South Pacific could pursue a “share the SWAN” strategy whereby the South Pacific would convince and assist other bloc members in implementing endorsement programs similar to the Southern World Assembly Initiative if they do not currently have one. Some members of the Partnership for Sovereignty already have endorsement programs, such as the Union of Democratic States and the Free Nations Region. However, all other bloc members should look to implement similar programs soon if they currently do not have one to ensure that as many nations as possible endorse their respective delegates to maximize the collective bloc vote in the Security Council. Another way defenders can prevent or overcome a loss in influence in the World Assembly and military gameplay is by expanding the defendersphere and seeking out new regions that may join the defender cause. This path is uncertain and more diplomacy-intensive, but expansion is the most rewarding because this taps into a new trove of World Assembly endorsements and additional forces in defensive military operations. In 2021, we saw the surprising addition of the Democratic Socialist Assembly into the Partnership for Sovereignty. While this expansion did not produce additional military strength for defenders in military gameplay, it did constitute something of benefit for defenders in the Security Council, representing more potential delegate votes and one further approval for the defender agenda there. Defenders in military gameplay and the Security Council should look toward other regions beyond the defendersphere as potential defenders that could help advance the cause in their respective realms of NationStates. Beyond the tangible reforms that defenders should pursue, such as maximizing delegate endorsements or shoring up military strength, we must also look toward cultural defenderism and how we will convince newcomers to join the cause in the next era of NationStates. We must educate the next generation of defenders and foster discourse that forms new ideas and propositions within the defendersphere. We have seen arguments that Independents stand to gain the most out of frontiers and strongholds, but we should not overlook how the newcomer’s experience of this new interregional system could mold them into a new generation of defenders. Without question, defenders will have to examine the multifaceted effects of frontiers and strongholds on their respective regions, military gameplay, and the Security Council, and the issues may extend beyond what I discussed here, but this is a discussion that defenders must have concerning their collective future because the next era of NationStates should have rules and norms determined by defenders instead of other ideologists. Before others try to define the new interregional order, defenders must establish it themselves by setting concise regulations in their policies concerning frontiers and strongholds. First, defenders should unabashedly defend all frontiers created by those who are not raiders, hateful ideologists, or otherwise troublesome actors. Some opponents may argue that frontiers constitute “fair game”, but we must affirmatively state that that is not so. Second, defenders should agree to mutual defense and non-aggression treaty amendments or memoranda of understanding with their partners that the invasion of an artificial frontier constitutes an act similar to the invasion of the main region. In early December, the South Pacific committed itself to this principle by issuing Cabinet Order 8, which states in part, “The Cabinet of the South Pacific...will extend any non-aggression or defense obligations toward a region to all its duly declared satellite regions.” Third, defenders should create the conditions by which they could disincentivize the invasion of frontiers by formalizing a multilateral defense alliance that establishes the casus foederis that an attack against one member is an attack against all members. This phrase should sound familiar to some because this represents the overarching purpose of the real-life North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This alliance, governed by a treaty that enshrines and espouses defender values, could serve as a doorway for new regions interested in joining the defendersphere. The legal instrument that will govern this alliance should explicitly mandate defender commitments, such as interregional regulations on offensive military force, non-aggression toward all regions with which member regions share embassies, and the defense against quorum raiding attempts in the World Assembly. This list is nonexhaustive but provides a few examples of guarantees that defenders should make to resolve ongoing issues in the current era of NationStates toward defining the new rules-based system in the next era of NationStates. An informal alliance of this kind somewhat exists through a patchwork of mutual defense treaties. Right now, only 10000 Islands, Spiritus, The Rejected Realms, and the South Pacific have such a collection of bilateral treaties in which they all agree to provide for each other’s mutual defense. However, defenders should look toward expanding that and formalizing it to give way to a path for new and prospective defender regions joining the alliance and, ultimately, the greater defendersphere. In the context of frontiers and strongholds, a formal defense alliance between defenders will become invaluable because of the instability generated by the new interregional system, and a new generation of defenders may come into existence as a reaction and out of necessity to frontiers and strongholds, with previously unaligned regions searching for ways to assure and guarantee their sovereignty, providing newer entrants into such a defense alliance. One argument against formalization could be that it is unnecessary to pursue a formal multilateral defense treaty since an informal alliance already exists. However, some used the same rationale against the Partnership for Sovereignty, arguing that an informal bloc already existed, but as we learned over time, the new, formal bloc gave defenders a medium in which they could discuss Security Council resolutions amongst each other, issue joint voting recommendations, coordinate approval and unapproval campaigns, and expand the defender partnership in the Security Council, seeing regions such as the Philippines and Democratic Socialist Assembly becoming part of it. Out with the Manifesto and in with the new Defender Consensus. It could be that the recommended rules-based interregional order I laid out will not entirely comprise whatever defenders in government ultimately agree to, but the presence of such rules made by defenders is crucial to define how the next era of NationStates will unfold and whether we can thereby transform these rules into norms accepted by other actors and incorporated into their laws, treaties, and traditions. However, it is imperative that we set the rules before someone else makes the rules for us. [/font] [font=Arial]

Ex Minister of Media

(This post was last modified: 12-21-2021, 04:42 PM by Floptop.)

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On the whole, I think this article makes a good point about how Frontier/Stronghold needs to be framed by defenders as being an opportunity to create and solidify an international order based on universalized regional sovereignty, including sovereignty of "Frontier" regions. 

I think this update could potentially produce a propaganda boost for "pure raiders" because it gives a notion that natives have "opted in" to a "raiding/defending game" instead of simply being stuck with it. I think this update will likely be a propaganda boost for Independents because it gives actual concrete stakes to the idea of "regional interests" in a military context -- i.e. creating and defending your own Frontiers and raiding/destroying the Frontiers of enemies. 

I think both of these propaganda points can be contrasted by the notion of an international order which Jay forwards.

I'm cautious about Jay's notion of a multilateral defense alliance. For starters, it's unclear how much such a thing might matter, defenders are already fairly synchronized. That said, it begs the question of how such an alliance would work, how integration between regions would work, and what the political and military purposes of the alliance might be. From there, we can start to seriously evaluate such an idea and its value. On its currently stated terms, I'm not sure the idea is revolutionary, but I think there's something there we can build into something

Minister of Foreign Affairs
General of the South Pacific Special Forces
Ambassador to Balder
Former Prime Minister and Minister of Defense

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